[x]

stainsi feel like cutting off something beautiful.
a patch of trillium,
grasp thick stems,
crush petals and leaves til they weep
dewy and full in my palm.
leave a patch,
the size of a man's fist,
the size of your fist,
the size of each fist that has torn
something out from my throat.　

freckledthe sun is wine,
round in my stomach,
shrill in the beaks of birds.

clover muddles your fingers,
muddles your teeth and breath
and skin. you are only
a spot in the trees.
planted among trillium,
stalks thickening your limbs,
my limbs dappled.

i taste summer
all through you.

canopymy mother stands
a tall wide person
perfecting the art of being short.
her hair is a nest,
snarls pulled and discarded,
the ever changing patterns wiped.

my grandmother
deals with abuse in secret ways
then tells me about it
thirty years too late.
she dabs at her lipstick,
folds the napkin and
creases it firmly.

my other grandmother lives alone
in a building of people,
wax, soap, and flesh.
she sleeps in a room filled
with the fantasies of a lonely wife,
the thoughts of a woman long gone.

my third grandmother
lives with another woman
and her family
has forgotten her.

my aunt crooked her back,
sometime in a summer unrem

_we kiss each other's palms like diamonds
like rising suns
collapsed naked in the folds
of our bodies, in the creases
of your joints i lie
barely coherent in my form

INSTRUCTIONS FOR EGRESSbite yourself open like plastic,
skin slick and foreign
on your tongue.
dismantle yourself carefully,
as no one is to notice until
you fall in preplanned directions
at their feet.
begin at the bottom,
the least exposed.
begin so that you yourself
fail to notice until the middle.

linger.
certain portions
deserve wrenching.
hush each instinct as they rear.
they are superfluous,
hindrances.
the middle is meat;
you, in the thick of it,
but not yet fully impaired.
take special care removing
shredded flesh around
the wounds in your belly. they are
deep and ever-rotting.
without concerned intervention,
they would have to

the road is alivesleepy-limbed and knock-eyed,
we wither golden and hazy,
our bones frail.
we stand as children.

step across concrete, puddles,
grates, fumble for bits of yourself;
they rest with lint and change.

we are all just skin. hands reach,
scrabble from anywhere everywhere
to snip a bit of our hair and withdraw,
satisfied. but they will be back.
we collapse against ourselves,
against each other, throwing anything everything
at our own loss.

oak porchtobacco, sweet, against the inside of your lip,
against the inside of your lung,
sweet against your naked breath

rain pockmarks
and grinds dust into shallow craters
fires flare and die
within your palm

15412a nest of serpents
lingers in your wrist.
occasionally they slump
to your eyes,
tease the peripherals
until you snarl,
choke animus with animus.
soon they are the only blemish,
a malignancy.
the sun frightens
and wraps them gently back
around each other,
around the underside of an ulnar.
to let them free,
snap each finger off backwards
and watch the slow leak.

vestibular nerveyou gather rowan
pomes, my hair blows over
your hands

you are close
but that

is still too far.

built from the music upthe first word of this poem has gone.
the body has forgotten itself
and each stanza splits
into autonomous lines,
each speaking its own history only
as far as its own borders.
this poem lays mortar
only to concuss against bricks.
tearing its core,
this poem has sacrificed itself
in the name of a faith.
retched, swaying in breezes formed
by unrecorded ancestors,
filling in its own lines
only to be erased by the flick
of its wrist.
this poem has left.
this poem runs.

on giving upi have known shame once,
it is something that everyone
should know.

scraping feet across bankrupt pavement-
wall street, tall and meek, sketchy smiles, rabbit feet
many people have come to live here,
but many more die here,
understand that i was surrounded by ocean
i could've swam to maine if i wanted to

but i just stood in the sky.
felt my face, felt the fever drain
i am weak, i say
i am tired, i say
but even my own mother does not listen to me.

it would be better to say only one thing
and not mean it, than to say two different things
and mean them both. it would be better to walk and never look back at
the city behind you

+there is ink settled
in the curve of your chin,
graceful arms shadowed
on a wall when
you decided, hey, let's
dance to the music of
dawn birds. there is
a mourning in the way
your tongue slides over
the word "we"
and tastes it like coffee
with cream and no
sugar. i took your
kissed fingerprints
and gathered them,
placed so
like the direction matters;
your touch fairly
blinded the birds
sleeping in everyone's wrists
and they screamed
because there are
things too beautiful
for here. weighty pages
draw inspiration
from your voice and
write god in
english, russian,
and portugese
so normal
people can understand
ho

he is here.where i sleep
there is the shoulder-scent
of your body deep
in teenage sorrow,

pillow lips hugging my temple,
feathers running through hair
estranged fingers-

there is a dusk under my eyelids
dampening my joints, a cold blue

and frozen air to the skin,
making it rise with little moons
over the halves of nails, with the slow fall
of the dawn outside bleeding red
into the own blues of the sky

and the cobalt rain a tap on the glass
of my window

a transparent whisper.

pneumatizedit could find nowhere in my caverns,
and so made new ones,
rusted tearing echoing off every wall.
i am a room of unbeing.

here: you must understand.
the thought of being a room
surpasses legitimate confines.
your bones are hollow.
you are wingless.
yet thumbprints smear across your face;
you are an object.
the sharp division of
day and night insist,
insist.
to reconcile the two,
an ocean ravages the lining
of your body.
each morning you wake
to its drunken lurch against
the nearest thoracic wall.

understand this.
to hear the voice of god
is to hear the swelling miscreation
skulking in the trusses.

on rust and hungermarbles roll in my mouth,
gathering lint,
the dryness of disuse.

they clatter behind
my teeth
when I try to speak,
clutter absurdly
when I move my
jaw.

my ribs open,
leaf-like,
along a spine;

I am a creature of hinges and screws.

I am a swell of minerals like hymns.

I am a polite impossibility, a
quiet sacrilege, a
dove's breast from which
delicate, thin lines drip.

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More from ~orangecloudsraining

north east southwestslip your hands down my shoulders, and memorize the pattern of markings. press your soul in fingerprint markings down my calves, make me feel as if i take up space. i need to be reminded of my existence or it might fall away all together. spell your name onto my collarbone in swirling font and count the cubic inches i exhale.

take the mid night hours and spread them apart, find more time in-between and use it to write your animation onto a sheet of paper. drop your words into my mouth, feed me like a starving cub, my palate is dry without your recited weeping.

wind telephone wires around my hands, dig them into my wrists and leave indents n

nauseathere are earthquakes inside
the knuckles that held my hand,
and writhing rivers in the light
blue strands that dip into your
shoulder blades

i am not afraid to say that
i am afraid which may seem
like an oxymoron, but i
promise you it is not

i broke glass over your head
and cried into the shards,
only because i was trying to
make you see how beautiful
it is, how the glittering
light loves broken things

you always snipped the tags
off of tea bags and when i
asked why you said you
were saving for something
that you couldn't remember
but goddamnit
it is important

i had a fit of vanitywahid. don't spread yourself between my thighs, and expect my breath to come in gasps because i forgot your name. sprawl on a bed and weep for nothing, i won't wipe your tears.

ith-nain. jilted lovers are the worst kind, don't tell me about the romance of a broken heart when you don't have one to break. don't spin beautiful tales with perfect grammar that follow a flaxen haired princess from a tower into the jaws of a dragon.

thalatha. a cocked hat, painted coal black, some unidentifiable baseball team inscribed on the the front with mercerized cotton.

arba'a. don't take your ears in my hands and close my mouth slowly, i want my words to l

staring into wellschalk;
you remind me of letters not sent, languishing in drawers or cubby-holes with no intention of ever being read. glue driven into the cracks of your skin, i held you carefully and shh-murmured it'd be all right. that's okay that your arms aren't strong enough yet, i'll wait for you.

mist;
sometimes i'm afraid you'll simply evaporate. i could see right through you when we met, and nothing's changed. even your words are quiet, as if they had to be dragged out of your throat, but darling, there's nothing to wait for. i'd gather you up into a tiny bundle to care for, but i couldn't bear breaking you.

gloves;
yeah, so i saved the middle

pastel paper heartsthe teacups survived three weeks of constant usage, being set on window sills and forgotten, cracked in the sink and raised to her lips so often the paint was worn away in two places.

she never noticed they were empty because somehow herbal tea aromas hung from the lampshades and lingered there until her flesh opened and the room was filled with vanilla. everything was in opaque strokes of watercolour pastels and when she licked her lips it reminded her of frozen berries and the way in which her sex was like folding white sheets to tune of Beethoven's 9th symphony..

her house decorated with fairy branches and white hair and kitty cats that

it was never about you+
thought

+
it was so good at the time

+
we could have done so much more that night, put stars on the ground and written colors into the fabric of the sky

+
'yeah, sure. just a minute, let me get my things'

+
keep your head up, cheeks tense, nose flared, don't let them see

+
write two point three lines and shred them systematically the next morning because you couldn't find what you needed to extinguish the fire

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sonskyn

by ~orangecloudsraining, Apr 1, 2012, 7:44:43 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

i entangle myself in the sky,
grasp and tug on breezes,
expect grass to be as thoughtless
as my skin.

i am complete, here,
amongst the feelings of stones,
as april folds me,
intricate, in its madness.

sonskynby ~orangecloudsraining

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

i'm going to try napowrimo just because there's nothing else to do. unless they are exceptionally horrid, i'll upload them all here. hurray!

sonskyn means sunshine in afrikaans. it's just pretty.

!cemetery-roses Apr 10, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

i like it... sweet and simple <3 pretty

~orangecloudsraining Apr 11, 2012 Student Writer

thank you!

*toxic-nebulae Apr 8, 2012 Student Writer

this has been featured here: [link]

~orangecloudsraining Apr 8, 2012 Student Writer

eeee.

~breathingglassstars Apr 3, 2012 Writer

_{i missed you so so so much dear
and this is what i needed, these words}

~orangecloudsraining Apr 4, 2012 Student Writer

it feels good to write again.
i'm glad, glad.

~breathingglassstars Apr 11, 2012 Writer

_{it must be lovely. i wish i had it in me to write more than i do.}

*toxic-nebulae Apr 3, 2012 Student Writer

yay you can napowrimo with me!!!
also I love the poem, especially the last line.

~orangecloudsraining Apr 3, 2012 Student Writer

it's only the third and i'm already thinking "oh shit, i have to write again?!" i might not make it to the thirtieth.

thank youuuu.

*toxic-nebulae Apr 4, 2012 Student Writer

I keep almost-forgetting.

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sonskynby ~orangecloudsraining

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